HERNANDO COUNTY, Fla. — Weeki Wachee is famous for its beautiful river and of course the mermaids. But, there’s also an extensive underwater cave system there and now an underwater research team is giving us our first look at what lies below the surface.
- Underwater cave at Weeki Wachee
- Deepest part stretches over 400 hundred feet underground
- Dive crews exploring, researching cave
It's a breathtaking cave system few people have ever seen.
"A lot of people compared it to going to the moon. There's been less people in the back and in the bottom of the Weeki Wachee cave system than have visited the moon," said Brett Hemphill with Karst Underwater Research.
The deepest part stretches over 400 hundred feet underground.
Karst Underwater Research team members started diving at a small spring in the natural protected area near Weeki Wachee in the mid-1990s. But, after a drought in 2007, Hemphill said he and his team were able to access the main spring which lies in Weeki Wachee State Park.
"The drought was so hard that that flow dropped from 200 cubic feet a second all the way down to below 100 cubic feet and we were actually able to get in and push into an enormous room that just matrixed out and turned into this amazing cave system," Hemphill explained.
They've named that enormous room “Mount Doom.”
In 2014, Hemphill and his team realized the system from the spring in natural protected area and the main spring were connected. They estimate the entire system is about 30,000 feet long.
"Weeki Wachee is an incredible cave system as well because it actually has microbial fossils that actually show how many times salt water has inundated this aquifer during smaller ice ages and stuff,” Hemphill explained.
He said they didn't have the technology to document it all until now. He hopes their work will help preserve the caves and the spring for years to come.
"We have to document these things for a baseline, they'll be able to say well this is what it looked like and somehow hopefully that will help protect the resource," Hemphill explained.
Representatives with Weeki Wachee Springs State Park stress that diving like this is very dangerous and is only to be done by permitted and experienced divers.